Harry and the Potters

Earlier this year the Harry and the Potters duo announced on their website that they had broken up: The two members could not agree on how to continue as a band now that J.K. Rowling had published her last Harry Potter book.

A couple of months later, Harry and the Potters announced that they were planning one of their most ambitious tours to date. It was a little confusing. But this is, after all, a band that purports to be a collaboration between the fictional Harry Potter in his fourth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and the more mature seventh-year version of himself, so a little confusion is to be expected. (The breakup story, it turned out, was an April Fool’s joke.)

The two Harrys are Paul and Joe DeGeorge, brothers from Boston who, so the story goes, formed the Potters six years ago after none of the bands they had booked for a backyard concert bothered to show up. The brothers put on some glasses and Hogwarts ties, wrote seven Potter-themed songs in about an hour, and then performed them for the handful of guests still remaining. Soon they were booking all-age shows, most of which were in libraries instead of nightclubs, and releasing albums such as Voldemort Can’t Stop the Rock. Even more remarkable, they’ve inspired a mini-movement of “wizard rock” bands, some of them preteenage, with names like Draco and the Malfoys.

Rowling is known as a zealous protector of her own copyrights, but she has so far remained silent on the phenomenon. Let’s hope she keeps her lawyers in check so we can see how this movement plays out.